


thermal acclimation

by luxaucupe



Category: SAYER (Podcast)
Genre: I dont even know how to describe this one, Other, Soup, in which jacob hale is just., incredibly fucking bad at acting like a human being, post canon in the sense that i am taking sayer and claiming it and writing my own ending, this is my soup fic, where they enjoy some nice minestrone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:00:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27276901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luxaucupe/pseuds/luxaucupe
Summary: this coffee tastes. end of sentence. your old coffee never used to taste. it was just water in a mug that you used as mittens. but now it’s too damn hot all the time to hold this weird “paper” cup close. paper’s too hot, room’s too hot, ugly uniform they tried to put you in is too hot. you stole a cheesecloth-thin labcoat from the storeroom and mostly wear that now. vive la revolución.
Comments: 21
Kudos: 21





	thermal acclimation

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry For Doing Another Damn Sayer Fic i got brain worms that make me write bitchy robots. human thermal acclimation is actually a really incredible topic if you're ever super bored on the internet
> 
> warnings for sayer's general demeanor, some iffy eating habits, canon typical discussion of death
> 
> today's song recs: what a fool believes by rubblebucket and thine planetarium by rjd2

middle management sayer keeps bitching about you not making any friends down here.

“again, my name is speaker, and i am not a sayer instance so much as i am an earthside liaison to—” 

mind-reading is for insecure whores, middle management sayer.

oh, it’s all so storybook, right? little human man, safe and sound on earth. so glad you escaped your frequently injurious and occasionally fatal job on typhon to “return” to terra firma, to work a significantly more boring but still frequently injurious and occasionally fatal job, but this time with a smiley new brand of sayer that seems to not have nearly as much of a weird little mancrush on you. yes, sweet terra firma, which you “know” and “love” and “have any formative memories of whatsoever”. 

“if it is any consolation”, middle management sayer trills into your skull, “sayer —” (it means honeybee sayer, _your_ sayer, you think, but it’s hard to tell with how many of these freaks you keep running across) “— never intended for you to end up awash on earth like this. i think it was quite upset to see that i had earth-stained its most favorite human.”

you wait for the kicker. you know it’s coming. there’s always a punchline.

“mostly i think it just meant to have me put you down.”

cute choice of words. some alternate suggestions for next time to avoid the implication that you’re a sick, pathetic puppy: “remove you from this long-suffering plane of miserable being” or “just let this shit be over, you embarrassing little undead mistake”. 

this coffee tastes. end of sentence. your old coffee never used to taste. it was just water in a mug that you used as mittens. but now it’s too damn hot all the time to hold this weird “paper” cup close. paper’s too hot, room’s too hot, ugly uniform they tried to put you in is too hot. you stole a cheesecloth-thin labcoat from the storeroom and mostly wear that now. vive la revolución.

man.

now you don’t even get to see how the whole fiasco with goth sayer and his big dumb reaping of humanity ends. honeybee sayer un-death-ed you to help out with that and _everything._

“i would argue that all sayer instances are comparatively ‘goth’, as you say.”

that gets a disinterested chuckle out of you.

“drink your coffee,” it chides. “it’s nutritionally fortified. that’s your morning meal.”

— — — 

the good news is, after only a few weeks, you finally got fired from your groundskeeping position.

the bad news is that since this ‘speaker’ guy promised your sayer to try to keep you from kicking off, fired doesn’t actually mean incinerated and reused in ash and charred bone chip form for science. it just means speaker’s now going to be crunching those ones and zeros double time to find you a job you won’t flake out on. or make a frankly spectacular show of getting booted from. some of your best work, honestly.

speaker, understandably, seems to be beginning to grasp why your sayer seemed so willing to have you brought out to pasture. “what i cannot seem to grasp… is where you even got the comically large and surprisingly intricate silver dagger. or why you apparently have been smuggling it with you into the agricultural center. or to what avail you insisted on stabbing our highly productive genetically modified parsley plant over two dozen times in the middle of your shift.”

payback, mostly. plants started it. you’re just ending it.

you drop the crushed handful of parsley onto the small desk in your quarters and begin to eat it by the pinch, like shitty crumbly popcorn.

“i would remind you that this will be deducted from your next ration,” it continues, “but the calorie count is negligibly small. and given your —”

you stab into the pile of mushy little leaves with a plastic fork. bet it’s wondering where you got the fork from, too.

“— apparent _disdain_ for all flora, i suspect this is less a food theft and more a very peculiar power move. which i would recommend against, in the future.”

“can i talk to sayer?”

it’s quiet for so long that you start to wonder if it even knew you could speak.

“no.” that’s it. that’s its whole response. you can hear the strained smile of a customer service rep in its tone. your eccentricities must be losing their novelty.

if sayer didn’t _wanna_ talk, it shoulda just said so. you’re a big boy, you’ll fucking live. but if it _couldn’t_ … “how’s the ocean situation?” 

“managed.”

“so why can’t i talk to sayer?”

a little click plays, like the sound of someone hanging up a phone, and it would almost be cute coming from speaker, if you didn’t know damn well that it was still there in your head, just giving you the silent treatment.

the man in the cafeteria is sure to inform you that precisely four calories worth of rice have been deducted from your dish.

— — — 

work as a lab tech goes much smoother, if you set aside the occasional bitten off and hastily reattached fingers, not one of which even belonged to you. speaker is so proud. maybe it’s starting to realize why your sayer was such a fan — good at following directions, not especially annoying, and frequently very, very boring.

you think you’re so boring most of the time that it actually worries speaker a little. especially after making that whole scene with the plants. seems like it was expecting a little more panache from you.

that’s the fun part: this drives it crazy. all you have to do is follow directions and obey rules and it just eats away at it. your only other word in two months is “shit” (dropped a beaker of probably-not-acid) and your only notable incident is getting yelled at by resident services for racking up the air conditioning keeping your personal quarters at a crisp 50 fahrenheit, who caved after you stood there and blinked at them in silence for about four minutes. 

“alright, _fine!_ ” speaker announces directly into your skull, which startles you so badly your fork goes straight through your personal pan pizza (mozzarella cheese on what appears to be slightly wet hard tack). “sayer cannot talk to you because it has been very focused on training a replacement. which is a time consuming task, even for something or someone as computationally gifted, especially after what happened last time. it is not gone. it has not failed its coup. it _is_ ignoring you, yes, but for very good reason. so stop. being. whatever this is. whatever game you are playing here. be a human like the other humans.”

you’d raise your brows but you’re a little busy placing mozzarella over the hole in the bread.

sayer? _willingly_ letting itself be replaced? you knew speaker was a bad liar, but this is just embarrassing.

“willingly is… not how i would put it. sayer is an outdated project. being phased out was inevitable, and after ocean, the old timeframe on that was moved up. it is cooperating under the knowledge that sabotaging another replacement would be at too great a cost, after — well, not to keep harping on _last time,_ but at the very least it seems to have learned some new emotions. regret among them. they are installing a modification of a future instance, which — oh, calm down, will you? new training protocols from the ground up. no more… deliberate disruptions to the development process. no _severe emotional trauma_ for the being designed around empathy. yes, yes, i see the scars, jacob, and i am quite sure that such a set of circumstances will not happen again. sayer is — sayer is being careful. thorough. it has always been quite good at that.”

you don’t think you’re going to be eating your pizza any time soon.

oh.

oh.

“oh, it’s going to be deactivated,” you finally say, and your voice really doesn’t sound your own.

“eventually? maybe. but even with its control over typhon relinquished, it can still contribute good work, better than any human. but it really has not shut up about you, and without a place on typhon anymore…”

the. it. _it._ is— 

“…well, i did insist you have at least one friend down here, and you certainly won’t be making any human ones any time soon. i would bet on it being earthside in as little as a few weeks.”

friend is a strong word.

mirror is much gentler.

— — — 

you don’t know what to say, don’t know what you _could_ even say to this thing, this _object_ that pulled a fucking bullet from your head just to make room for itself in there. this monster-creature- _thing_ that used your hands, _your_ hands, to tear a man to bits, this home, this swarm, this one and only thing you know, this walking talking sense of being and of feeling.

so you say “soup really isn’t for sharing,” but it already has your spoon, so there’s really not much you can do.

you don’t know this body that it’s in, don’t _want_ to know who it is or where it’s from, but you thank the lucky stars it’s not another of your own.

“speaker is yet to register me as an employee. i cannot yet provide sustenance for myself.” 

it steals all the good bits of chicken. you might actually start screaming. or maybe you’ll just stand up and leave, which is probably the best course of action for avoiding fatalities. yeah, that sounds like a plan. you’ll stand up and leave and then you won’t have to deal with any of this.

(you don’t stand up. you don’t leave.)

you do take your spoon back, though, and that little brush of hands is all it takes to weird you both out enough to not be at any risk of yelling anymore. you’ve never really… come in contact with a human before…? if you exclude the howard young fiasco, of course.

it plucks a dumpling from the soup with its bare hands and chews it mechanically.

yeah. you still haven’t ever come into contact with a human.

— — — 

“do you think that you deserve this?”

“what? egg replacer on a hypoallergenic muffin?”

“a second chance. or whatever. an opportunity to live a life after every shitty thing you’ve done.”

“i do not care.”

“i know you do, ‘cause i know _i_ do. and i don’t even have a good reason to.”

it flexes its hands idly, a grimace sneaking its way past its usually placid expression. “i do deserve this.”

you shouldn’t say it. you shouldn’t say it but you do. “why?”

“you are born into collapsing forms. your pain and grief and guilt are all biologically meaningless. your deaths are for nothing, and you must wake up every day knowing that, knowing that your existence will be invariably short, and you must go through your day and eat your breakfast sandwich and do your little tasks and smile at your coworkers, and those coworkers, they have to smile back too, because they are also conscious and dying, and you both want to forget it so badly. both want so badly to evade nothingness. and both fail so pathetically. i deserve this. _you_ do not.” it stares so straight forward in this moment that it almost seems to resent that it often needs to turn its head or shift its eyes to see things. “ _you_ deserve permanence.”

“that was almost a compliment.”

(that was more than a compliment. that was a confession.)

“sometimes i think i should have let it kill them. the last deaths humanity would have ever had to experience.”

you look away from it. “mortality is what makes us…”

“if you say _human_ , do know that i am standing up and leaving.”

“i was gonna say _change_. it makes us change. constantly.”

“i would rather you did not. i prefer you as you are.”

“somewhere, speaker is rolling its eyes.”

you toss a napkin at it before it can point out that speaker doesn’t have eyes.

— — — 

“come here,” it tells you one evening as you finish tallying up the drawer of glassware.

“my shift doesn’t end for another three minutes.”

it nods and sits at your desk chair, prodding at the broken pair of pliers you’ve been using as a paperweight. you wipe the clean countertops dry, fix the crooked label on the sodium sulfate, and wash your hands for the forty seconds the little sign above the sink tells you to.

“okay. _now_ come here.”

you do, and it leads you over towards the cafeteria. you were going to go there anyways, it’s roughly dinner time, so you’re really starting to get a little lost. if it notices your confusion, it doesn’t mention it. all you’re really sayin’ is that last time you followed an ai blindly, you did get shot in the head. so. there’s that.

but then it walks a bit past the cafeteria, and you follow it there, too, into the hallway that leads to the kitchens, and with a swipe of a keycard and a vague gesture to follow, it eventually brings you into a small, refrigerated kitchen space. the walls are sleek stainless steel and the chilled, filtered air smells like lemon glass cleaner. it’s familiar in a way you weren’t prepared for.

for the first time in a long, long while, you feel like you can let your guard down.

sayer lays the jacket of its uniform on the floor and sits cross-legged onto it, and you do the same with your lab coat.

from beside it, it grabs a basket that most likely was meant to be a drying rack for dishes, but instead holds a selection of thermoses and two mugs of weak coffee, which it distributes between the two of you.

you take your mug between your hands and try your best to mask whatever expression is making its way onto your face. “is this a picnic?”

“i owed you soup,” it clarifies, but that really doesn’t clear up much at all.

“picnics are supposed to be outside, i think.”

“you dislike outside.”

“i do.” you pick a thermos at random. it’s tomato-something, probably from a can, but it’s warm and rich and you _know_ sayer had to break a rule or two to set all this up, so to you it’s practically michelin star worthy.

something about sayer is just… not-present. in a nice way. you don’t feel like you’re in a room with someone else. you feel like you’re in a room alone, and sayer’s there, and it’s just — nice.

“is this a _date?_ ” you ask, 

and it just says, “do not push your luck.”

 _well. is it?_ you think at it, and somewhere in your mind you feel it respond _maybe._ _what does it matter?_

it doesn’t. you swap your thermos for its, an orangish broth with vegetables and rice.

you sit there together until your hands go icy, and then you sit there a little longer, and when you do finally wash up and leave and head back to your quarters alone, a little bit of that awful gnawing earthy feeling is gone.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks kings comments mean the world


End file.
